Overview

Designing, simulating, and visualizing urban regions is a task of critical importance today. In the year 1900, approximately 14 percent of the world's population of 1.6 billion people lived in cities. Today it is estimated that more than half of the world population live in cities and the population has grown to over 7 billion people. Moreover, over the next 30 years the growth of the population and amount of urbanization will only increase.

Being able to design, simulate, and visualize current and future cities is very useful to regional planning agencies to evaluate sustainability, architectural designs for future growth, land use regulations, and environmental protection policies. However, cities, and urban spaces of all sizes, are extremely complex and their modeling is still far from being solved.

Modeling current and future cities is an inherently multi-disciplinary problem. The underlying model of an urban space does not only contain geometrical aspects but also a very large number of hard-to quantify variables that span social, economic, meteorological, architectural, engineering, and policy/political aspects.

Our research efforts have focused on obtaining digital models of large-scale urban structures in order to enable simulating physical phenomena and human activities in city-size environments. The model could be used to understand the behavior of the captured structures in several scenarios such as earthquakes, crashes, and explosions.

Furthermore, the models should be easily modifiable and extendable in order to guide urban development plans supporting efficient population growth and emergency response. Rather than focus on minute environment details, the emphasis should be on modeling flexibility and on intuitive planification, visualization, and response.

Our CGVLAB research group is active in several urban modeling related projects bringing together researchers from a variety of areas, including computer science, computer graphics technology, earth and atmospheric sciences, urban planning, urban design and architecture, and more.